perf: Add generic transaction flags
Add a generic qualifier for transaction events, as a new sample
type that returns a flag word. This is particularly useful
for qualifying aborts: to distinguish aborts which happen
due to asynchronous events (like conflicts caused by another
CPU) versus instructions that lead to an abort.
The tuning strategies are very different for those cases,
so it's important to distinguish them easily and early.
Since it's inconvenient and inflexible to filter for this
in the kernel we report all the events out and allow
some post processing in user space.
The flags are based on the Intel TSX events, but should be fairly
generic and mostly applicable to other HTM architectures too. In addition
to various flag words there's also reserved space to report an
program supplied abort code. For TSX this is used to distinguish specific
classes of aborts, like a lock busy abort when doing lock elision.
Flags:
Elision and generic transactions (ELISION vs TRANSACTION)
(HLE vs RTM on TSX; IBM etc. would likely only use TRANSACTION)
Aborts caused by current thread vs aborts caused by others (SYNC vs ASYNC)
Retryable transaction (RETRY)
Conflicts with other threads (CONFLICT)
Transaction write capacity overflow (CAPACITY WRITE)
Transaction read capacity overflow (CAPACITY READ)
Transactions implicitely aborted can also return an abort code.
This can be used to signal specific events to the profiler. A common
case is abort on lock busy in a RTM eliding library (code 0xff)
To handle this case we include the TSX abort code
Common example aborts in TSX would be:
- Data conflict with another thread on memory read.
Flags: TRANSACTION|ASYNC|CONFLICT
- executing a WRMSR in a transaction. Flags: TRANSACTION|SYNC
- HLE transaction in user space is too large
Flags: ELISION|SYNC|CAPACITY-WRITE
The only flag that is somewhat TSX specific is ELISION.
This adds the perf core glue needed for reporting the new flag word out.
v2: Add MEM/MISC
v3: Move transaction to the end
v4: Separate capacity-read/write and remove misc
v5: Remove _SAMPLE. Move abort flags to 32bit. Rename
transaction to txn
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1379688044-14173-2-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
3 files changed